@Muganda,

I know of a group of women who wanted to join this jamii bora - Koinange Branch, but the staff there were so rude I wonder why?

Good, informative thread.

Lew Wasserman arrived in Hollywood in 1939 to help Jules Stein transform MCA from a band-booking company into a talent agency for movie stars. He did that and a whole lot more, as award-winning business reporter Bruck makes clear in this absolutely riveting account of power-broking in Tinseltown. Wasserman's career possesses a kind of epic symmetry: by freeing the stars of the 1940s from the servitude of studio contracts, he effectively ended the era of the movie moguls, only to become the greatest mogul of them all. But, as Bruck explains in painstaking but absorbing detail, Wasserman redefined the role of the mogul. In the days of Warner, Mayer, et al., the moguls operated their individual fiefdoms, largely independent of one another; Wasserman wanted it all, and eventually, as MCA morphed into Universal Studios, he got it--not a fiefdom but the whole empire. Television, we learn, was the key. Whereas the old guard saw TV as a threat and attempted to close ranks against it, Wasserman saw it as the future and sought to dominate it. Long before content became a buzzword for the Internet generation, Wasserman bought Paramount Pictures' film library for peanuts and peddled it to the networks for millions. With the gusto of Howard Cosell at ringside, Bruck reports on business coup after business coup, showing not only how Wasserman roped his dopes but also how he acquired the leverage (Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak helped) to do so. This is the most revealing look at the business of Hollywood since Robert Evans growled his way through The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994). Ilene Cooper

book: When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence

Connie Bruck (Author)

www.amazon.com

"Nobutoshi Kihara" of sony is he a mundu wa nyumba?

In 1985, a young lady writer penned an article for the Washingtonian about a man who had died that very day. Titled "Like Something the Lord Made" the aricle would become the most important piece in her life's work.


Vivien Thomas
Her account was about a black carpenter name Vivien Thomas who had died on the very same day she wrote her article. Vivien Thomas was born in 1910 in racially segregated Louisiana, was grandson of a slave, and married with two daughters.

In 1930, Vivien Thomas was black, nineteen years old, a carpenter's apprentice, having completed High School with sights set on Tennessee State College and hopefully medical school. But the Depression wiped out his savings forcing him to postpone college. He secured a job as a laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs.

Within 3 days, Vivien Thomas was performing almost as if he'd been born for the lab, doing arterial punctures on the laboratory dogs and measuring and administering anesthesia; a month later it was delicate and complex operations. Dr Blalock was astounded by Thomas' remarkable intellectual acumen and manual dexterity, and Thomas rapidly became indispensable as a research partner to Blalock forays into heart surgery.

In 1943, Blalock was approached by renowned pediatric cardiologist who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called blue baby syndrome. Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition. Thomas demonstrated that the corrective procedure was not lethal, thus persuading Blalock that the operation could be safely attempted on a human patient

On November 29, 1944 when the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant, because no instruments for cardiac surgery existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those he used in the animal lab. During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, he stood on a step stool behind Blalock and coached him step by step through the proceure. You see Thomas had performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, as compared to the Dr Blalock who'd done it only once, as Thomas' assistant. It was the first ever open heart surgery.

They ended up working together for 34 years. Although Vivien Thomas received little public acclaim, to the host of young surgeons Thomas came to train in the 1940s, he became a figure of legend. In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained — who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America — commissioned the painting of his portrait in John Hopkins University. In 1976, John Hopkins University awarded Thomas a honorary doctorate.


Black Biography:Vivien Thomas

Are you law-abiding if you do so and your life doesn't depend on it?
Are you principled if your principles have not been tested?


Basboosa was born in 1984. His father, a construction worker died when he was 3 years old, and his mother then married his father's brother. He went to school in a one-room village school, and never finished high school. He had a total of six siblings.

So what were the options? Basboosa's application to the army was refused, all his various job applications rejected, and their family had no breadwinner.

By the age of 26, Basboosa had been a street vendor for 7 years, selling fruits and vegetables from his push-cart. He earned about Kes 11,200 per month and used the money to take care of his mother, her husband, and younger siblings. His dream in life was to buy a working van to sell his wares


One morning this past December, Basboosa took a debt of Kes 16,000 to buy his wares. But a policewoman confiscated his unlicensed cart and its goods. Basboosa desparately tried to pay the fine of Kes 800 but the policewoman slapped the scrawny young man, spat in his face and insuted his dead father.

Humiliated and dejected, Basboosa went to the administrative headquarters to complain to local municipality officals, but they refused to see him.

At 11.30am on Dec 17 2010, less than an hour after the confrontation with the policewoman and without telling his family, Basboosa returned to the double storey white building that served as the administrative headquarters, poured fuel over himself and set himself on fire.


The young man, known to his friends as Basboosa died 10 days later - his official name Mohammed Bouaziz.
And with his action, this legend of a man, from the dusty streets of the impoverished town of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, set into motion events that within one month would topple the presidents of two countries, and cause revolutions in another 4 countries in one of the most conservative regions of the world.

http://www.time.com/time/world/...e/0,8599,2043557,00.html